Ryan Lochte was poised to escape the shadow of his more famous teammate, Michael Phelps, when he glanced up and there, literally larger than life, was a shirtless Phelps.
At that moment, Lochte could have been forgiven for screaming: Michael! Michael! Michael!
Before the final of the 200m intermediate medley on Thursday night, the scoreboard at the Foro Italico showed a crowd shot including Phelps, who set the world record in the event in Beijing but is taking a break from it this summer.
PHOTO: AFP
Since 2004, Lochte has played Robin to Phelps’ Batman in the 200m and 400m IMs. He finished second to him in both events at the 2007 world championships and qualified behind Phelps in the 200m IM at the 2004 and last year’s US Olympic trials.
“I looked up at the scoreboard and they showed the crowd, they showed Michael, and I kind of smiled,” Lochte said.
Lochte was not wearing his diamond-encrusted grillz teeth at the time. That adornment came later, during the awards ceremony, when Lochte received gold after making off with Phelps’ global mark.
Lochte, who led the final from the opening 50, was timed in 1 minute 54.10 seconds, 0.13 of a second faster than Phelps’ record and a 0.46-second improvement over his previous personal best. After shedding suits — he switched from a full-body Speedo LZR Racer to the waist-to-ankle leggings model — Lochte returned to the pool and advanced to the final of the 200m backstroke.
No sooner had Lochte finished the 200m IM than the phone of Bob Bowman, the US men’s coach and Phelps’ personal coach, started vibrating in his pocket. Bowman looked at the text message.
It was from Phelps, and according to Bowman it said: “That was a great swim. I think it’s still breakable.”
Aren’t they all? The world record by Lochte was the first of seven to fall on the fifth night of competition at the championships, bringing the total to 29 in 42 races.
The times on Thursday were so sublime that Eric Shanteau was clocked under the existing world record in the semi-finals of the 200m breaststroke, and did not even qualify first. He was second behind Australia’s Christian Sprenger.
The sprinters were so fast that David Walters broke Phelps’ year-old American record in the 100m freestyle with a 47.33 and finished fifth. Cesar Cielo Filho gave Brazil its first gold medal of the championships with a world-record clocking of 46.91. He touched out two Frenchmen, Alain Bernard (47.12) and Fred Bousquet (47.25).
Cielo Filho and Bousquet train together in the US and Bousquet said they push each other in practice to times that are close to records. In that case, the race must have felt like practice as usual; Bousquet, swimming in Lane 8, was first at the 50m, 0.03 seconds ahead of Cielo Filho in Lane 5, who secured the win with a finishing surge.
Before the race, Cielo Filho was so nervous his limbs went numb. In the ready room, where the finalists are sequestered, he slapped his legs to try to return feeling to them. “I never had this before,” he said, adding that he could not feel his face either.
Cielo Filho was wearing the Arena X-Glide, a polyurethane suit that is running neck-to-neck with Jaked in the popularity race. Last year’s leader, the Speedo LZR Racer, is a distant third.
Bernard and Bousquet were trying to shake off the downer that was France’s third-place finish in the 400m freestyle relay four nights earlier. Bousquet, who swam the last leg, absorbed a lecture from Hawke afterward.
“He told me to stop acting like a boy and start racing like a man,” Bousquet said.
Lochte, 24, is never more mature than when he is racing. He has been known to arrive at the starting blocks on his skateboard and he has an adolescent’s fixation on the rapper Lil Wayne. But once he hits the water, he is as serious as a recession.
Phelps, Lochte and the backstroker Gemma Spofforth of Britain are the only competitors here to have set world records in the LZR Racer.
“I mean, everyone’s complaining about all these new suits, blah, blah, blah,” Lochte said. “And I go out there and wear the same suit as last year and I just give it to them.”
The night did take its toll. Lochte walked into a news conference with red, yellow, green and blue wires streaming out of his sweats. He was hooked up to a contraption the size of a computer battery that was sending restorative electrical currents to his tired, tight leg muscles.
He also was wearing nonprescription George Burns glasses, which was perfect, because Lochte is the driest of comedians.
Earlier, Lochte had described his grillz. They were different from the ones he wore on the awards stand at this meet two years ago.
“This time,” he said, “the diamonds are bigger so I can shine a little more.”
A sumo star was born in Japan on Sunday when 24-year-old Takerufuji became the first wrestler in 110 years to win a top-division tournament on his debut, triumphing at the 15-day Spring Grand Sumo Tournament in Osaka despite injuring his ankle on the penultimate day. Takerufuji, whose injury had left him in a wheelchair outside the ring, shoved out the higher-ranked Gonoyama at the Edion Arena Osaka to the delight of the crowd, giving him an unassailable record of 13 wins and two losses to claim the Emperor’s Cup. “I did it just through willpower. I didn’t really know what was going
The US’ Ilia Malinin on Saturday produced six scintillating quadruple jumps, including a quadruple Axel, in the men’s free skate to capture his first figure skating world title. The 19-year-old nicknamed the “Quad god,” who is the only skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition, dazzled with an array of breathtakingly executed jumps starting with his quad Axel and including a quadruple Lutz in combination with a triple flip and a quadruple toe loop in combination with a triple toe. He added an unexpected triple-triple combination at the end to earn a world-record 227.79 in the free program for a championship
Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter is being criminally investigated by the IRS, and the attorney for his alleged bookmaker said Thursday that the ex-Los Angeles Dodgers employee placed bets on international soccer — but not baseball. The IRS confirmed Thursday that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara and Mathew Bowyer, the alleged illegal bookmaker, are under criminal investigation through the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office. IRS Criminal Investigation spokesperson Scott Villiard said he could not provide additional details. Mizuhara, 39, was fired by the Dodgers on Wednesday following reports from the Los Angeles Times and ESPN about his alleged ties to an illegal bookmaker and debts well
MLB on Friday announced a formal investigation into the scandal swirling around Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter amid charges that the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar was the victim of “massive theft.” The Dodgers on Wednesday fired Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s long-time interpreter and close friend, after Ohtani’s representatives alleged that the Japanese two-way star had been the victim of theft, which was reported to involve millions of dollars and link Mizuhara to a suspected illegal bookmaker in California. “Major League Baseball has been gathering information since we learned about the allegations involving Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara from the news media,” MLB